Trap... that's actually the perfect word...So much about Scorn feels like a trap. It’s designed to cost you progress, to waste your time, and some might think this burdensome despair is some sort of brilliance on the part of the developers. To someone who values their finite time on Earth, it’s snide crap that shows contempt for its audience at every opportunity...I have nothing but contempt for it in turn.

I take no pleasure in admonishing this remaster. Sacred 2 occupies a small but precious space in my heart, and I’m shocked to see how disastrously this has turned out. There’s still fun to be salvaged from the wreckage, but I can’t ignore the fact that Sacred 2: Remaster qualifies as a defective product. I have so many questions about how this came out in the state it’s in, but one query stands above them all.

The Last Oricru is a masterpiece of bad design. When a game has to warn its players not to invest in half the available skill points because they’re worthless, you know you’ve got something special, and that’s what Oricru is - special. It’s so profoundly wrong it deserves to be studied, dissected, remembered for years. Its creators should tour universities and give talks about their artistic philosophies so future generations can learn how never to make a videogame. If you’d told me aliens had developed it, I’d struggle to argue, such is the incomprehensible absurdity on display...I am in awe of such a marvel.

Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic...Yep, that’s the word for it...Sonic Frontiers is fu..ing pathetic.

The dreadful studio that brought you Quantum Error has delivered a game very much in line with its library of shameless trash. It is legitimately sad that not enough people knew of its lineage before Code Violet benefited from a whole lot of ill-gotten hype.

Ugly and threadbare, both mechanically and aesthetically, Garten of Banban has spread its lumpy legs and given birth to one of the most cynically manufactured franchises of all time.

Puzzles are more tedious, scares are more pitiful, and for all its expanded gameplay, this sequel manages to be no better than the last.

Life of Black Tiger is a massive piece of f*cking shit. Also it has multiplayer.

The only worthwhile thing to say about TAKEN is that its name is quite meaningful indeed – it’s taken peoples’ money, and it’s done nothing to earn it...Oh, and the “scary” little girl looks shit.

I wish this game had a head so I could stamp on the back of it and push it mercilessly into a pile of sick and guts.

Simply put, Homefront: The Revolution is outclassed in its bracket by every other big-budget game released this generation. And that’s without getting into how shockingly shit the PC version is...This game made me feel unwell, it bored me to tears, and it irritated the piss out of me. Also, it has co-op.

Here They Lie smacks of cynicism – a game designed with the knowledge that horror works really well in VR, without anybody involved knowing how VR games should operate. It’s distinctly unpleasant to play, and I fear it’ll be only one of many horror games that pull the same stunt as virtual reality continues to hold sway.

It’s certainly nothing professional, and it absolutely does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as a real Dark Souls game. That anybody thought this monstrous garbage was a good way to promote an upcoming game speaks volumes about the disconnect from reality videogame executives suffer from.

Alone in the Dark: Illumination is ugly in every sense of the word, not just visually – though it is about as attractive as an anus in an eye socket. Hideous both inside and out, it’s the consummate fraud that hides behind a recognizable name to deliver interactive poison.

Something ugly to the point of actively affecting gameplay, something that requires multiple reloading of saves to fix glitched doors, something that crashes when given a chance and boasts a user interface that actively fights the player. That this saw a release and expects to sell for real human money is lunacy. Then again, that’s this game all over – sheer, unbelievable lunacy.

It’s disgusting on almost every level, and the fact Topware is selling it for $54.99 is unforgivable.

Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe such a poisonous display of IP leverage. There’s something actively nasty about the thing. It’s a reminder that creativity is not owned by the creators, it is imprisoned by the least creative among us, those of us who force others to dance but can't carry a tune.

This appalling paid-for tutorial is inexcusably lazy on top of being just plain inexcusable to begin with...The only thing Welcome Tour has welcomed us to a brand new breed of garbageware.

This could have been good. A dungeon crawler in the Overlord universe has some promise, but there’s just nothing here. No satisfying loot drops. No expanding combat ability. Nothing but braindead, horrifically designed combat. Oh, and a few utterly insipid pressure-plate puzzles. Because those are always fun...I fucking hate it...That is what I’m trying to say.

They say familiarity breeds contempt, and the more time I spend in this series’ dismal world, the more relatable a statement that becomes.

Zenith isn’t just badly made – it’s appalling. A boorish, cynical failure of a comedy game broken in ways I’ve never before seen. The fact it somehow – everso rarely – manages to show a glimmer of wit under all the misery only worsens the deal, highlighting how this could have perhaps been something decent before it was run through whatever thresher led to it becoming the mangled carcass it is...There is no cure for the disease this game carries. The kindest thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet between its glazed, gormless eyes.

Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes...To play it is to cringe at a rare extremity of creative shamelessness. This stunning example of maladroit artistic negligence struggles to achieve the deeply grounded bar of “playable” yet has the insulting nerve to try and claim a desperate connection to Silent Hill. The temerity of this crime against spookiness is off the charts...How dare Stray Souls? How f.cking dare it?

It’s one thing to rip another game off, but to only pretend to rip one off for attention while doing something so threadbare it doesn’t even clear the low bar of plagiarism truly is deceptive on a whole other level. The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is not a forgery of The Last of Us - it’s a forgery of a forgery, it’s something so completely fucking fraudulent that it sells the idea of a counterfeit and delivers instead a handful of minimally functional assets structured just barely enough to resemble half an hour of navigable gameplay.